Detects facial features automatically. Easy and effective object removal. Lets you continue work in Photoshop and Lightroom. Fast operation.

Cons

Limited intensity of some effects. Requires Adobe account.

Bottom Line

With the ability to turn frowns upside down, Adobe Photoshop Fix is a powerful and impressive photo-retouching app for iOS.

At Apple's 2015 iPhone launch event, the audience was wowed not only by new hardware announcements, but by one software feat in the presentaton: Adobe showed off its free Photoshop Fix iPad app, which convincingly turned a photo subject's frown upside down. So can Fix really increase the happiness quotient in your pictures? We got early access to the app to find out.

Starting UpYou don't need a Creative Cloud subscription to use Fix, but you do need an Adobe account, which is available with a free signup involving little more than providing your name and email address. At startup, the app shows you videos depicting the things you can do with Fix. And the first time you use any of its tools, a helpful tooltip informs you of its purpose.

I tested Fix on a fourth-generation iPad with Retina display. After logging in, the app popped up a message saying automatic backup was enabled, meaning anything edits to photos that I made in Fix would be saved to Adobe's Creative Cloud. Then a four-panel tutorial appeared, showing how to change facial expressions, perform spot healing, paint on color, and move your work to Photoshop.

I wanted to try the Apple event's frown-to-smile effect right away, and was even more impressed by a demo Adobe showed me, because the app actually selects facial features automatically with the tap of a face icon. I loaded a photo I shot on the iPad of my handsome coworker, Tim Torres, in which I'd instructed him not to smile.

To get started editing any image, you tap on the large Plus Sign button on the left rail. You have to allow access to your camera roll, but you can also load images from Creative Cloud, Lightroom Online, Facebook, Dropbox, or you can shoot right from within the app. To get Tim looking happier, I used the Liquify option. This mode offers Warp, Swell, Twirl, Reconstruct, and Face tools.

When you tap Face, the app places dots over the subject's eyes, cheeks, lips, and chin automatically. You tap on any of these points to edit them, and as you might expect, to get a smile, you tap on the lips. Not only can you make lips smile, but you can thicken them, widen them, and raise or lower them.

A similar app from CyberLink, called YouCam Perfect, lets you recontour facial features, too, but Fix's auto-selection of them is a real plus. Though YouCam Perfect's Face Shaper can be used to effect a smile, Fix is impressive in moving just the right spots to get a convincing smile, though it's best for a subtle smile rather than one that's cranked all the way from ear to ear.

Fix's smile choice overlays a curved dotted line that you can move up or down, but without the eyes and cheeks smiling, too, it wasn't a truly joyous result. At first, I thought the tools limited how far you could go with adjustment. But you can apply effects multiple times for multiple increases in smile intensity. You can also easily make people look less appealing with Fix—giving them bug eyes or warped faces. It's fun.

The app isn't perfect, though: One photo I used had a face further back and tilted, and the software couldn't identify it. And the app crashed at one point during editing, but only that once over a full day of use, so by today's iOS app standards, its pretty sturdy even in this first release.

More Than Just SmilesFix is about a lot more than just putting smiles on faces, though. It can perform many of the standard image editing feats, such as cropping, lighting, and color saturation. It also lets you paint over your image (using a color chosen from the image itself with a dropper if you so desire), and adds effects like defocus and vignette. It does not, however, offer Instagram-like filters like the Adobe Photoshop Mix iPad app does.

Lighting and color adjustments can be brushed onto specific parts of a photo, rather than applied to the whole image at once, as most simple photo editors do. But this tool doesn't let you create drastic enough results for my taste. In a test shot with blown-out bright windows on the side, I couldn't sufficiently darken the offending areas.

The Vignette Effect tool is pretty cool, with good control over shape and color, but the Defocus tool is disappointing.It can take the edge off of distracting backgrounds, but it doesn't offer a strong blur effect like CyberLink PhotoDirector offers. I'd prefer to select the part of the image I want in focus, as PhotoDirector allows. Fix has you paint on the defocus areas.

Sharing and OutputThe work you start in Fix doesn't have to end there. Fix offers sharing to the typical social outputs, and to other iOS apps that have implemented share sheets. You can also send edited images via Creative Cloud to Adobe Photoshop (where its edit layers will be preserved), Lightroom.com, Behance (Adobe's social network for creative professionals), Facebook, and Instagram.

If you choose Photoshop and have Creative Cloud app running on your desktop, you'll see a notification that a new image has arrived, and Photoshop opens with the image. But not all edits were preserved in layers: In particular, the smile reshaping work I'd done was in the base layer, and I couldn't back out of it with Undos. But adjustments like Contrast, Saturation, and Exposure do have layers preserved.

An App That Makes You SmileAdobe Photoshop Fix is a powerful and impressive photo retouching app for iOS. I'm particularly impressed with how fast it accomplishes effects, even on an iPad that's not the latest generation. In the past, the Liquify effect was taxing even to a reasonably powerful desktop. You can find other apps that do similar things, but if you're a creative with an iPhone or an iPad, it's worth checking out. Especially if you're an Adobe user.

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About the Author

Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine's lead analyst for software and web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine's coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of web services for a general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine's S... See Full Bio

Adobe Photoshop Fix (for iPad)

Adobe Photoshop Fix (for iPad)

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